McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Oct. 19, 2011

With the college football season running at full speed, fans have settled into the weekly rhythms of the sport. On Thursdays and Fridays, the hype and handicapping of the upcoming games fill the airwaves and 4G networks. Saturday is game day, and it stretches from the morning pregame shows to the final gun of the Oregon game.
Sundays rehash the upsets and big wins, and the armchair quarterbacks rule. Monday morning wraps up the drama with the latest national ranking of the top teams.

The granddaddy of the weekly ratings is The Associated Press Poll, which celebrates its 75th birthday this month. Along with its major competitor, the USA Today Coaches Poll, the AP voters cast their ballots for the top 25 teams within the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. For you old-timers, that’s the newfangled name for the big boys, the Dee-Wun Ay powerhouses.

Remarkably, the past 75 years have seen few changes in the weekly AP Poll ranking process. Other polls have come and gone, and the Bowl Championship Series bulled their way into the sport in 1998. But the constancy of the AP Poll has equaled the Ohio State band’s ritual of dotting the “i.”

Since college football remains the only major national sport without a bracketed playoff, sportswriters have always daydreamed about the country’s best team. The big Eastern newspapers dominated the debate until the 1920s when emerging Midwest powerhouse teams excited both the regional and New York papers. Frank Dickinson pioneered the first quantitative judgment in the 1920s with a mathematical model. In 1933, Parke Davis scribbled and scratched his way to a retroactive selection of the mythical national champions from 1869 through 1933.

An AP sports editor named Alan J. Gould was part of the daydreaming crowd in 1935. Using informal inputs from his friends, Gould published his personal view of the top 10 teams at the end of the season. He had a three-way tie at the top—Minnesota, Princeton and SMU—all undefeated. The blowback from Minnesota fans was severe, and several hung Gould in effigy for daring to think any other team could match the Gophers.
Other reporters, especially Cy Sherman of the Lincoln (Neb.) Star, suggested that Gould move beyond voicing his opinions and develop a systematic rating system.
In a 1980s oral history, Gould recalled that after a few weeks into the 1936 season, he asked sportswriters to send a telegram with their rankings to him in New York. “We got a substantial response,” he said of the first voting cycle. Gould had no designated panel of voters, but rather asked the AP state bureaus to solicit input from papers that were AP members.

On Monday, October 19, 1936, the results of Gould’s first poll hit the AP wire, and the ranking appeared the next day in newspapers across the land. Minnesota topped the list of 20 teams, with almost double the points gained by second place Duke. Army was third. Each of the poll’s 35 voters awarded 10 points to his pick for the top team, nine for second, and so forth. Minnesota earned 345 points, almost a clean sweep. The accompanying text, without a byline but likely from Gould, offered the reasoning behind the choices.

After seven weeks of polling, the AP disseminated the final 1936 rankings on November 30. Minnesota had remained in first, edging Louisiana State, 332 points to 309. The Gophers received 25 first place votes, and LSU, nine. Pittsburgh was third, and Duke had slipped to 11th. Army had gone AWOL.
Gould acknowledged that the formal poll was not just about establishing rankings.
“It was a case of thinking up ideas to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays,” he told AP writer Herschel Nissenson in 1985, eight years before he died. “Papers wanted material to fill space between games. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”

An example of Gould-induced hullabaloo occurred in 1979 when Ohio State won the AP regular season championship by a Buckeye-lash over Alabama. Although poll voters gave Alabama 29 first place votes, and only 16 to Ohio State, total points determined the rankings. Ohio State’s 1,267 edged Alabama’s 1,265 ½.
Crimson Tide hate mail flooded Gould. One was addressed to “To What Big Dummy It May Concern.” Another, “Alabama is and will always be No. 1. What does AP really stand for, Always Prejudiced?”

Gould’s rabble-rousing notwithstanding, the AP has tried to minimize unfair controversy by establishing a series of guidelines over the years. “AP wanted to make sure voters actually covered games and were not affiliated in any way with the schools,” explained Darrell Christian, an AP sports editor at large. Christian said in a recent interview that a fair and balanced approach was the goal.

A rival poll began in 1950 when the second major wire service of the day, United Press, recruited members of the American Football Coaches Association to rank teams. All voters were Division I coaches, which prompted the AP’s Christian to observe: “Our voters don’t have the inherent conflict of interest that the coaches do.”
UP became UPI in 1958, and then punted the poll to a USA Today/CNN partnership in 1991. ESPN later replaced CNN, and since the start of the 2006 season, the newspaper has run the poll alone.

In the years since 1936, other sponsors of college football polls have included the Football Writers Association of America, Helms Athletic Foundation, and Sporting News. The New York Times, Jeff Sagarin and others have produced rankings drawn from math models or computers.

From 1961 through 1967, the AP reduced its rankings to 10 teams before returning to 20 afterward. They expanded the list to 25 in 1989.
The AP conducted it final poll and named its national champion before the bowl games through the 1964 season. It experimented briefly with a post-bowl ranking in 1965 and caused a dust-up in the Midwest. When the regular season poll winner Michigan State lost to UCLA in the Rose Bowl, the Spartans lost the AP national title. The AP retreated to pre-bowl rankings in 1966 and 1967 before permanently shifting its final poll to after the New Year’s Day galas.

Both the AP and Coaches polls generally coexisted with the old-line holiday bowl games until the early 1990s. For years, some of the bowls had honored contracts with specific conferences, or had felt compelled to select at least one nearby regional team to fill the seats. Examples included the Rose Bowl, which had to offer bids to the winners of the original Pacific Coast Conference and Big Ten; New Orleans’ Sugar Bowl usually invited the Southeastern champ; and the Cotton Bowl, which matched the Southwest Conference winner against a good draw.

After a couple of false starts, the Bowl Championship Series arrived in 1998 and swept the AP and Coaches polls into its hissing and whirling ranking machine. After some unpleasantness in the 2003 season that questioned the independence of the Coaches Poll from the BCS, the role of polls in the BCS calculations came to a head at the end of the 2004 season.

The BCS released the bowl matchups for that season on December 5. Besides No. 3 Auburn grumping about missing the title game—Southern Cal and Oklahoma had bagged it—the battle for No. 4 and a lucrative spot in the Rose Bowl against Michigan gained the most attention.

A week earlier, AP voters had Cal-Berkeley at No. 4, followed by Texas at No. 6. The coaches had ranked Cal fourth and Texas, fifth. In the days following, Texas coach Mack Brown lobbied voters in both polls to raise Texas in their rankings. Some did, which allowed Texas to ease ahead of Cal by .0129 points in the final BCS calculation. The Yellow Rose of Texas bloomed in Pasadena.
Kirk Bohls, a member of the AP panel since 1989, was one of the voters who Brown had pressured. A columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, Bohls acknowledges that the incident made 2004 his worst year as a voter.

“I wasn’t swayed by Coach Brown, however. I just listened. I had watched Cal play that weekend against Southern Mississippi and I thought they had struggled. Texas was the better team.”

Since the AP panel members make their votes public, and the coaches do not, the resulting media attention focused more on the AP Poll. The oft-maligned BCS system has always gathered plenty of adverse attention, but feedback from their voters caused the AP to reconsider its role in the BCS. On December 21, the AP withdrew its poll from the BCS formula. Terry Taylor, the AP’s sports editor, talked at the time about ethical concerns and voter harassment. “It had just gotten to a boiling point. It was causing a problem for our members.”
Christian added a more recent explanation. “Objectivity is a basic principle of the AP. We cover the BCS, therefore we cannot be affiliated with the BCS, and their use of our poll was beginning to take on the appearance of crossing that line.”
Bohls agreed with the AP’s withdrawal from the BCS. “We cannot allow any perception of bias to exist.”

The Harris Interactive Poll replaced the AP poll in the BCS computer algorithm beginning with the 2005 season.

The current panel of voters that the AP uses for its college football poll contains a mix of 60 reporters, editors and broadcasters. Four are national, such ESPN’s Chris Fowler, and the remaining are drawn from states that have Division I FBS teams. The AP uses a formula to determine the number of voters—states with one to three schools get one voter; four to six, two voters; and so forth. Nine states have neither Division I FSB football schools nor voters.

“About 50 percent of our voters are new each year,” said Paul Montella, the AP’s sports “agate” editor. “The AP reporters and editors in each state select the voters. Also, each voter must work for a media outlet that is a member of the Associated Press.”
David Teel, sports columnist for the Daily Press in Hampton Roads, is the sole AP voter in Virginia. He rotates on and off the football panel, yielding to a reporter in Richmond. With only two FBS teams—Virginia and Virginia Tech—the commonwealth merits only one AP voter.

“It’s hard work with a tight deadline, Teel said in a recent interview. “The last Saturday game finishes after midnight my time, and I have to email my rankings by noon on Sunday.” Teel uses the precious week’s ranking as a starting point, watches a DVR of selected ESPN shows, checks sites on the Internet, and applies his own experience and feel to make his judgments. “Sometimes it’s a little easier,” he said. “Just look at LSU’s string of wins over ranked opponents in the first five or six weeks of this season.”
Bohls also begins his weekly ranking analysis with the previous poll results. He then charts the wins and losses, with emphasis on key variables. “I will reward a road win over a ranked opponent,” he said recently. “Mine is a results-driven process.” But he acknowledges that other voters have their own processes. “It’s like making chili—everyone has a different recipe.”